Observations and short cuts. How to grow food with very little effort. Easy, quick ways to do complex, time consuming tasks with your landscaping and the insects and animals available to you in the city or country. In depth, if you want it. Shallow and quick, if you need it that way.

Profile of the author

I have over 25 years of experience and education manipulating environmental situations.
If I had to have a quote that sums it all up it would be:
Find the choke point, the spot most easily interdicted and changed with the least amount of effort to effect the desired outcome. This is more easily said than done, of course, and it takes a lot of thought and consideration.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Raspberries

First four raspberries are ripe. Fantastic flavor. Huge crop coming.

The only thing that eats raspberries besides humans is hornets and they don't take much. It is the perfect crop for areas with pest problems. A few bugs eat the leaves as do chickens but raspberries grow so quickly it is hard to slow them down by being eaten.

I have been lax at publishing. So much has happened. The front is getting a 35-40% rehab into bee flowers, the bees have produced well and are reproducing quite well, mead is being made, apple wine is made and years since 2005 are aging(which is kind of amazing), the Daughter is home from Davis for Spring Break of Senior year, five chickens, two brand new cats-with character, a National Park tour on-a-budget, chicken tractors are wonderful, etc? I will get back to it. The amount of info accumulating has been daunting. I just need to figure out how to filter it down to fit into this small a space. Maybe I will just start up again and forget about trying to catch up. Off we go...

I'm in a bind--I have raised garden beds with wire across the bottom that supply a fraction of the produce my husband and I will eat in a year. We have about a 1/4 acre we could til for a garden, but the gophers seem to eat everything. Now my mother, an avid gardener & canner, has has just moved to CA from the Midwest. She has no land where she lives and I'm motivated (somewhat strongly by) guilt to find a way to get her a larger garden.

Our yard is mostly in clover, grass & wild radish and the gopher activity is high. I tamed & neutered all the feral cats but I really don't want to put out poison anyway. Should I simply tithe large parts to the gophers? Are there tricks to reaping anything I sow directly in the ground?

I've only been here a few years and the gophers appear to have won. Any suggestions?

P.S. As you said on your site--the raspberries are not a target. I have lots of berry bushes--everything else goes in a basket.

K,Gophers can be controlled but you have to be willing to kill them or invest in gopher-wire boxes. You can build the boxes but it's more expensive than killing the "minions of the devil"(as one of our house sitters called them) with traps. The absolute best traps are called "cinch traps". They are not easy to find except online. Once you get the hang of them they work like magic. The trick to using them is to never touch the business end so they never catch any smell but their own. Macabee traps also work but are tougher to use because of the need for digging into their warrens to set the trap and you usually need more than one to be effective. I hope this helps. Gophers are THE most discouraging garden pest. Using cinch traps will rid you of the pests, if you use them with persistence over time. The little bodies make very good compost. Put them back in the hole from whence they were trapped and close it up. There is rarely more than one gopher per hole. They are very territorial. Old runs can be colonized by other gophers, however, but it usually takes a while for that to happen.

K,A thought: The cinch traps can be daunting to set. There is a learning curve to a perfect set. Take your time and always be certain you never put any part of your anatomy in the way of the cocking bar mechanism. The spring is very strong. This is probably why you do not see them in retail garden stores regularly. I own three of them and gave one to the bro-in-law b/c he could not find one in a store and was unwilling to pay shipping for just one trap. I've trapped gophers for decades and this is the best, albeit definitely the most dangerous to use, trap I have ever encountered. Watch those fingers. This trap will break them, I think.